Philosophy

Visible thinker

IN THE public mind, or at least that part of it which is conscious of such things, A. J. Ayer was the philosopher of the first three decades after the second world war. In this role he continued a tradition set up by John Stuart Mill and preserved by Bertrand Russell. All three had a thorough technical competence in their scholarly field of scientifically oriented philosophy. They all wrote well: Mill simply, Russell entertainingly, Ayer with sparkling concision. Each used his intellectual authority to support a number of progressive causes: Mill attacking the subjection of women, Russell the constraints of conventional sexual morality and the manufacture of nuclear weapons, Ayer racism in sport and the harassment of homosexuals. All three men led what were, by the standards of their day, questionable private lives: Mill carrying on with Mrs Harriet Taylor, Russell with four marriages and a host of affairs, Ayer as a womaniser to the point of satyriasis.

Even if less important as a philosopher and progressive ideologue than the other two, Ayer certainly deserved a biography and Ben Rogers has supplied him with an exceptionally good one. “A. J. Ayer” weaves the philosophical, public and private strands of Ayer's life together most skilfully and distributes attention between them in an admirably balanced way. Mr Rogers is sympathetic to his subject, acknowledging his highly evident faults—vanity, lack of any deep interest in other people, lechery and a largely decorative element of snobbish conformism—but seeing them as more than compensated for by his virtues, which included courage, a high sense of duty in everything but his relations to women and a freedom from malice quite remarkable in one so talked against to his face as well as behind his back. Mr Rogers has studied philosophy and handles Ayer's thinking most adroitly, conveying the essentials accurately without getting too involved in the technical detail.

Above all he has done a great deal of work. He interviewed or exchanged letters with 150 people, and it shows. There is a continuous flow of excellent and illuminating material from Mr Rogers's wide range of informants. Some of this is also very entertaining. A good example is Geoffrey Warnock's account of the attitude displayed one another by Ayer and J. L. Austin, from the early days in Oxford in the 1930s his most powerful and influential opponent.

“The fact is that Freddie Ayer and Austin were grossly, almost ludicrously incompatible, antipathetic characters. Austin was a respectable, rather severely upright, formal and straitlaced, dedicatedly domesticated husband and père de famille. He not only did not pursue or even contemplate the vie de bohème, he would not allow it even to be discussed, thereby diverging markedly from the more usual Oxford liking for gossip. This led, of course, to his being regarded by Freddie with a rather uneasy mixture of incomprehension, derision and utter boredom (on personal not professional terms), while Austin viewed Freddie (again in purely personal terms) with a kind of moral horror”.

Ayer's own testimony about his life is to be found in the two rather lifeless volumes of autobiography he published in 1977 and 1984.

These have next to nothing to say about Ayer's inner life. Mr Rogers contends persuasively that his childhood was more miserable than simply uninspiring. His father was remote and dull, his mother feather-brained and quarrelsome. At his conventional prep school and as a scholar at Eton, the small, talkative, exotic-looking, evidently Jewish Ayer was clearly subjected to a good deal of painful suppression and exclusion. Oxford was better, but even here there was much to cause resentment.

He did not get into All Souls (the fate of many highly gifted people) and he failed to get any secure college post in the university. Mr Rogers suggests that his various early trials and torments were much played down in his published retrospect, a view supported by quite a bit of quoted conversation. Mr Rogers even plays in the preface with the idea that Ayer was somewhat autistic. His fiddling with key-chains, his gabbling talk, his constitutional unconcern with the feelings of others are all symptomatic, but Mr Rogers sensibly drops the idea as “unfruitful”. He had many long and close friendships, and many of his mistresses (perhaps most of them) seem to have remained fond of him.

There was something pathological about his pursuit of women. He started soon after his first marriage, encouraged by the attentions of a dance-hall hostess in Vienna, and did not let up until he died approaching 80. When ill and old and about to remarry his second wife, Dee, he was still capable of planning to go off with a woman less than half his age. Women to him were like sweets to a greedy little boy. In general, he was not so much autistic as child-like, artlessly pleased with himself, insistent on being the centre of attention. He never really grew up.

But the book gives full attention to his merits. Numerous philosophers, now in their 40s, testify warmly to his excellence and devotion as a teacher. He not only discussed their work with them indefatigably, he was kind, attentive and encouraging, and worked hard at after-care, helping them in their careers which he had first got started.

After the great initial success (to some extent de scandale) of “Language, Truth and Logic”, he came back from the war to find that if it was a bible to students it had become something of a punching-bag for their teachers. His lively department at University College, London, kept the logical positivist faith alive, but philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge had gone off in a new direction. As it turned out in the end, Austin, his conqueror and pretty brutal critic, is now almost completely ignored, and American, scientistic philosophy dominates the English-speaking world. Ayer's long love affair with science was too chaste and unconsummated for him to become more than a fellow traveller. But “Language, Truth and Logic” is established as a minor philosophical classic and “The Problem of Knowledge” is a fine epistemological primer.